Parody of the sacred

Raven excells in his treatment of the constantly changing relationships between people and the change in characters themselves. Ravens hero is the seducer, finding his younger schoolmate sexually attractive and vet when the boy succumbs Fielding is disappointed at the loss of the lad's innocence. He says of Christopher; "He smiled, or rather, that's what he thought he did. But his smile had changed: although the mouth and the lips were the same, there was a new look in the eyes, a look of invitation. It was no longer a smile, it was a leer. So that's what's gone, I thought: innocence. And then this look, which would have been so welcome in many others as a herald of casual pleasure, filled me, for a moment, with loathing. In others I should have thought it saucy, sexy, enticing; in Christopher I found it an obscene parody of something which I had once-only a day before-held almost sacred."

Fielding realizes that his homesexual relationships are only a temporary testing ground for his sexual skills. His interest in homosexuality is merely intellectual, for which he finds support in Greek and Latin and in the public school system. He has amused himself with a variety of boys in the past without ill-effects and realizes it is only part of the graduation to women. Yet he reasons that since there are not yet any women towards whom he can graduate, and since his reading of Greek and Latin recommends it, one can have the best of both worlds. He sees homosexuality at the same time as a rejection of Christian morality. To him it is a pleasant pastime and he cannot understand Christopher's desperation and is annoyed at his demands.

Raven uses passages where Fielding can rationalize, explain his non-involvement and so link together the plot. Raven illustrates, and indeed it is this he himself believes, the upper-class arrogance and non-concern. His hero is aloof from the problems of others, taking an intelligent interest but remaining uninvolved until his own immediate interests are threatened.

Perhaps one of the best drawn characters in the book is Fielding's mother. She is shown to be the meek wife of a blustering man, and it is she who defends her son and his right to choose his own career. It is only when her husband dies and she is in control of the purse-strings that it is shown that she has taken over her husband's voice, had been defending Fielding only to bind him tighter to her and has reverted to her bourgoise ideas of wanting her son to be a "real man" doing a "useful job" even if it is not what her son wants. It is the separation between the educated and the uneducated, the intelligent child and the domineering parent, and as Fielding (or Raven) sees it, the conflict of class attitudes.